frameworks beyond a blank slate reset are bloated and handcuff your design. css is part of the presentation layer, which means it is supposed to be subject to the restrictions of the design, not the other way around. bad frameworks like 960.gs just handcuff your design and force you to cram your design into its pre-existing shape instead of designing what you want and shaping a custom solution that fits it perfectly.

what if i want a full screen fluid/adaptive design? 960 goes right out the window. there's a reason why the internet has 15 thousand copies of the same website, and why every wordpress/joomla/cms template looks exactly the same, and these frameworks are the reasons why.

as a developer, it's only natural to want to make your job easier by not rebuilding the wheel, but the second you start sacrificing the end experience for your own ease, you need to bring in a new person to handle the ux/interface design and concern yourself solely with executing the finished design.

Although this thread is fairly old and probably has been ten topics like it since, I've been using Bootstrap by Twitter and that is excellent. Makes use of a lot of the frameworks out there and combines it all in one nicely with a nice JavaScript pack too.

Check it out, however in future, check the age of topics before posting. Often due to age the topic will be out of date, or another updated version on the forums.